Steve Sasson, pictured with the camera he invented in 1975 (Pic: George Eastman Museum)
It's not often my day job collides with Kosmo Foto, but this week is one of them.
I interviewed a former Eastman Kodak engineer called Steve Sasson for BBC Future about a project he worked on 50 years ago. Asked to investigate a new kind of semiconductor called a charge-coupled device (CCD), Sasson realised it could be a building block to a camera that didn't need film – a revolutionary concept for a company that had built its fortune on the back of photographic film.
"I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers. Most cameras at the time were mechanical marvels, and I couldn't build a mechanical camera to save my life. So I thought, since these guys are the cream of the crop, I'll just make one with no moving parts, and that'll annoy the hell out of them," Sasson told me.
After Sasson built the first handheld digital camera, he spent the rest of his career at the US film giant devising products that would help send film to the sidelines. The "received wisdom" that has been taught at the likes of Harvard Business School is that Eastman Kodak invented the digital camera but was too hesitant to capitalise it because of the damage it would cause to film profits.
It seems more like Sasson had invented the camera far too early for anyone to fully capitalise on it; the digital camera only made sense with personal computers and the internet, bot of which were years away from mainstream adoption.
It was fascinating to get Sasson's fly-on-the-wall perspective on a quiet revolution that would eventually change the way almost everyone on the planet takes a photo.
(Many thanks to Steve Sasson’s old colleague Robert Shanebrook, who helped make the introduction, and to the George Eastman Museum’s Todd Gustavson for his contributions.)
the new Chroma Click, with a 24mm lens (Pic: Chroma Camera)
The Chroma Click has landed
Steve Lloyd's Chroma Camera is a one-man cottage industry which has been churning out 3D-printed large-format and medium-format cameras for more than a decade. But one project has been quietly bubbling away in the background for a few years – a 35mm camera.
Chroma Camera's Click took years to perfect; Kosmo Foto helped with the development by testing one of the prototype cameras. Lloyd refined the design – which is built around his 24mm Double Glass wide-angle lens with an integrated finder. The camera can shoot half frame as well as full frame and is focus-free, with everything between 1m (3.3ft) and infinity in focus.
You can read more about the camera in Kosmo Foto's news story, and also see some of our test shots that we haven't published before. These were taken on a roll of AgfaPhoto Vista 200 in Paris while I was testing an earlier version of the camera, and haven't been posted online before.
Christmas stocking cameras
For the last couple of years I've been doing regular Cameraburo pop-ups at Aperture Printing in central London, a fantastic film processing lab with pretty much the best-stocked film fridges in town.
I've done a couple over the past few weeks which have included a toy camera sale full of rare novelty cameras.
Next up? A chance to buy cameras for as little as a fiver. I'm clearing out some of the point-and-shoots that have built up over the month and everything will be under £20. If you are in London and you were planning on buying a cheap camera for someone – or just want a cheap-and-cheerful camera for Christmas nights out, then come say hello on Saturday 20 December from noon til 6pm.
Til next time, happy shooting
Stephen Dowling
Kosmo Foto